Don Bradman Cricket 17 (PlayStation 4) Review

Having not played a cricket game for a decade and a half, I had been planning to give one a crack for a while.  Don Bradman Cricket 14 was going to be that game before it turned out to be insanely buggy, most of which were hilarious from the outside.  Kicking into Don Bradman Cricket 17 was always going to be interesting because I forgot everything about playing a cricket video game, so had to learn from scratch, and it was surprising.

When I say surprising I mean it was a much easier game to pick up and play than I expected.  Cricket is a complex game and both batting and bowling has so many little details, from how the ball is spun, where you position yourself, to what angle you swing the bat to when you release the ball so it should not be easy.  After a lengthy tutorial it was clear that it would take ages to master this game, but what the game does well is make the game simple to play the basics and take ages to master its intricacies.

Take batting for example; you use the left joystick to choose the back foot or the front foot and the right joystick to aim the bat and hit the timing right.  The intricacies come using the shoulder buttons to do different strokes but that is sufficient to bat.  Then there is bowling, if you are a pace bowler you choose how you will bowl, then hit X and as the bowler gets closer pull back the right joystick to jump and rock it forward to bowl, easy.  Then spin bowling, instead of jumping you just use the left joystick to apply the amount of spin and the right to bowl it.  The basics are so simple it makes it super easy to get engaged in the game quickly, even if you get whooped for a while.

As you would expect the game allows for quick games of any length, tournaments and online play, though I had major issues getting an online game going, hopefully with more people the matchmaking picks up.  But where I got lost in is the career mode.  Knowing about these modes existing in most sports games these days it was not something I expected to tickle me, but developing your player year after year as you boost your stats going through leagues is really engaging and fun.

Playing career mode also allows you an important option, the ability to play just as yourself or as a whole team.  If you set your character to be a bowler, batter or all-rounder determines the roles they play in a game and your character can just play those out.  This makes the games considerably shorter if you like as the AI plays the rest of the game out, which you can skip as required.  Fortunately, you choose to play as yourself or the whole team for each match so you can change your mind as you go.

But not everything is cheery as the game has some flaws.  The first one, which makes me sound like a snob, is the NZ stadiums.  It has two and one of them is the Sydney Cricket Ground, from Australia.  The second is called Wellington Park, which is not the name of a cricket ground I know, but it looks kind of like it supposed to be the Basin Reserve, but because of some design quirks I am not 100% it is.  A minor side note is the annoying commentators too which at first seemed great but they get repetitive and annoying, sometimes make the wrong calls as if their comments are loosely tied to the action.

The other major issue which is less snobby is the game crashes.  It crashes, a lot.  Normally this would be a deal breaker for me, I would pack a tantrum and walk away, but DBC 17 does not punish you as badly as one would expect.  When the game has crashed I have been able to return to the game I was playing, to the ball being played before it crashed, every time.  So even though the crashing is a real pain in the ass and to be honest not forgivable, the game remembering exactly where you are makes the pain considerably less painful and punishing.

Don Bradman Cricket 17 is a great cricketing game to enjoy this summer if the sun is just a touch too hot.  It is super easy to get into, even for newbies, but challenging to master each discipline and with a lot of teams including female ones, there is so much variety in the game.  The game crashing is concerning but a little bit forgivable thanks to it returning you to the same point in your match, albeit still a pain in the hole.  But if you can move past that there is a fantastic game here to play.

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